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Friday, July 25, 2014

Why Securing a Cease-Fire Will Be Harder This Time with Steve Simon

I do not know what the outcome will be, but this is now a potential action to completely dissolve all resistance in Gaza. As this makes completely clear two things have happened. All potential allies are engaged elsewhere and with the Ukraine, that even includes Europe and Egyptian interests now coincide with Israel's.

The bloodletting is well begun, but at some point all remaining Gaza combatants will be dead or captured or fleeing. At that point Israel has the option to conduct a house to house search for all potential enemy combatants and to imprison them all. It can then set up a representative government with the cooperation of the Egyptian government who also no longer needs this side show. such a government will not tolerate a radical agenda.

As well the outright liquidation of Hamas will place the present Palestinian leadership in a position to develop a more moderate position regarding negotiations.

Again my three cities solution continues to look attractive mostly because it provides ample face saving solutions to sharing spoils and future control. To start with a pacified Gaza needs huge capital and infrastructure investment to turn it into a prosperous city. That can be provided under a new representative regime that is inherently moderate.

In
thinking about how the crisis between Israel and the Hamas leadership
in Gaza might play out, it’s useful to reflect upon the preceding
Israeli incursion into Gaza in November 2012. Although that crisis
originated somewhat differently than the current one, there was a
similar dynamic, characterized by rocket barrages from Gaza with little
military impact on Israel, an increasing tempo of Israeli airstrikes
against targets in Gaza, a mounting Palestinian civilian death toll, the
call-up of IDF reserve units, and the deployment of ground forces
adjacent to Gaza in apparent preparation for an incursion. As now, this
posturing was meant to intimidate Hamas, impress Israeli voters, and
motivate anxious third parties – the US and Europe in particular, but
Arab states as well – to press Hamas to back down, lest the calamity
they feared come to pass.

However, the two episodes diverge in important ways. In 2012 there
was an Egyptian government led by the Muslim Brotherhood that was in a
position to influence Hamas decision-making in the crisis. Muhammad
Morsi was able to convince his Gazan fellow travelers that he was acting
in their interest and would protect their equities in a negotiated
resolution to the spiraling crisis. Morsi was able to work effectively
with President Obama to hammer out a framework for a cease-fire that the
two leaders could offer to their respective allies. (In a telling
moment, Obama had to spend much of his long awaited pivot-to-Asia trip
in serial telephone calls to Morsi and Benjamin Netanyahu about the
fighting in Gaza.) In the process, Egypt and the United States could
play the bad guys, allowing the Israeli and Hamas leaders to intimate to
their constituencies that Washington and Cairo had essentially
pressured them to back down before military victory could be won.

In 2014, however, the Sisi government has a much different
relationship to its Hamas counterpart in Gaza. Whereas Morsi was the
patron to a Hamas client, Sisi is, in effect, jailer to Hamas prisoners.
The Egyptian government’s domestic campaign against the Muslim
Brotherhood has naturally extended to the Brotherhood-dominated leaders
of Hamas. This arrangement has given Egypt a measure of control,
especially over the stream of violent radicals entering the Sinai from
Gaza through an astounding tunnel network.

However, it also results in Egypt having diminished leverage in the
ongoing crisis. Hamas can’t rely on Cairo to secure its interests in a
negotiated stand-down, nor can Egypt hint at concessions to a
cooperative Hamas leadership in the way that Morsi could. Thus, despite
Sisi’s constructive efforts to involve Egypt in a mediating role,
Cairo’s ability to influence Hamas is likely to be quite limited, as
Hamas’s rejection of its recent truce proposal shows.

In the absence of effective Egyptian participation, and with Hamas’s
political leadership holed up in Doha, a vital key to a cease-fire seems
unavailable. Hamas is therefore on autopilot, trying to wrest any
tangible win from a slugging match that has barely damaged Israel, while
exposing the Gazan people to constant air assault and the possibility
of a costly ground invasion. It has no outside allies to call upon; no
friendly power it can claim has compelled it to back down.

The Israeli government has a congruent problem. As long as rockets
keep falling, Netanyahu can’t back off, and as miserable as conditions
are for the people of Gaza, Hamas is prepared to take a good deal more
punishment than Israel has so far delivered. This has left Israel with
three unattractive options. First, it could wind down the pace of
airstrikes in exchange for a decrease in rocket launches, leading to a
cease-fire. This would look awfully close to a Hamas victory, or at
least evidence of Israeli military ineffectuality. Second, Israel could
maintain the status quo and continue hammering on Gaza until something
breaks. Third, and for some Israeli officials most promising, would be a
ground incursion that truly punishes Hamas, deterring future attacks
and comprehensively disarming it of missile and rocket stockpiles and
manufacturing facilities. One Israeli minister described this as a
“root canal” instead of a “temporary filling.” Some Israelis see Hamas’s
response to the Egyptian truce proposal as adequate diplomatic cover
for just such an operation.

In thinking through this last option, we need to recall yet another
precedent: Operation Cast Lead, which involved a large scale ground
incursion into Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009. The entry of Israeli
forces, which, like the United States military, seeks to minimize its
own casualties, inflicted heavy Palestinian noncombatant losses and
infrastructural damage. This was due in part to the co-location of
Hamas military assets with civilian installations and in part because a
casualty averse force will make liberal use of firepower to shift the
casualty burden to the other side. Although that operation failed to
disarm Hamas, it did provoke an international uproar, which Israel made
worse by excluding journalists from the battlefield. At the time, this
led to talk in Europe about economic sanctions, such as a ban on Israeli
citrus exports, and of course the Goldstone Report, which accused
Israel of targeting civilians. The mood in Europe now is, if anything,
even more sour, and an incursion would probably lead to action in the UN
Security Council that would put Washington in a difficult position.

The Israeli government is undoubtedly sensitive to these risks and
will likely conclude that disarming Hamas would entail unacceptable
risks to its international reputation. Perceptions of Israeli
bombardment of Gaza and wrenching stories of civilian casualties have
already raised concerns about proportionality. For the moment, these
are somewhat offset by Hamas’s missile barrage, but the pressures and
short-term incentives to opt for a ground offensive remain quite strong,
especially with the murder of the three Israeli teens keeping emotions
high. Washington has been preoccupied by the jihadist threat to Iraq and
managing the endgame of nuclear talks with Iran, but as options and
arbiters for resolving this conflict are in short supply, it will have
to stay focused on helping the Palestinians and Israelis find a way to
climb down.

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Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.